Along with the continual decrease in price and rapid development in the image capturing technique, mobile devices, such as smart phones, digital video recorders, and digital cameras, allowing user to generate, store and view image data have become so popular that almost everyone gets one. With a mobile device, everyone can become a producer and a user of multimedia data. In recent years, event data recorder has become an emerging mobile video recording device. Event data recorders provide effective evidence for clarifying responsibilities of an accident, and have gradually become an essential device to vehicles.
An event data recorder records whatever and whoever encountered during the trip. Therefore, whenever a traffic accident occurs, the police will collect the videos recorded by any event data recorders passing through the accident site on the same day to benefit the investigation of the accident. In general, most traffic surveillance cameras are installed near the intersections. The videos recorded in event data recorders can provide evidence for the investigation of traffic accidents not occurring near the intersections. However, adjacent video frames of original video records taken by event data recorders have high redundancy. Since the data volume is huge, a tremendous amount of labor and time would be required to check video to locate relevant segments if the huge volume of data is not appropriately processed in advance.
Mainly, there are two methods for constructing street views based on the analysis of images taken by mobile devices. The first construction method reconstructs street views with relevant images and data taken and collected by video recorders, laser devices, and GPS devices installed at transport vehicles such as SUVs, sedans, tricycles, and snowmobiles. The second construction method reconstructs street views with vertical strips continuously taken from the frames taken by video recorder installed on a lateral side of a vehicle. The second construction method is based on the assumption that the vehicle is moving at a constant speed.